Sunday, January 12, 2014

During closing arguments
Monday at the racketeering retrial of reputed mob boss Joseph Ligambi
and his purported consigliere, George Borgesi, a federal prosecutor
described a thriving Philadelphia chapter of La Cosa Nostra that rules
gambling and loan-sharking rackets through fear and force.

"The
evidence in this case shows not only how the mob makes money," argued
Assistant U.S. Attorney John Han, "but also how the money flows upward
to the leadership."

But to listen to defense attorneys, the
violent and structured Philadelphia mob of old was dismantled in
crushing federal indictments of the late 1990s.

"There is not
even a shell of the mob in Philadelphia anymore," said Ligambi's
attorney, Edwin Jacobs Jr. "Anyone blackmailing or loan-sharking is
doing it on their own."

The mob's ranks, he said, have been
replaced by "private contractors," who do not answer or pay tribute to
Ligambi but instead drop his name on the street to cash in on the
74-year-old's reputation.

After 12 years of investigation, 14,000
wiretap recordings, and 40 search warrants, the government has no proof
that Ligambi "received a single dollar or was overseeing or
orchestrating criminal activities," Jacobs told the jury.

Borgesi's
attorney, Christopher Warren, described the prosecution's case as "the
theater of the absurd" and "a bunch of androgynous bovine excrement."

Indeed,
the two-month racketeering conspiracy trial, which came after a jury
last year deadlocked on the most serious counts against Ligambi and
Borgesi, contained few descriptions of the violence that for so long
defined the Philly mob.

Rather, the case centers on the testimony
of a string of mob informants and undercover police who said that
Ligambi and Borgesi, as acting boss and second-in-charge after former
boss Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino went to prison in 1999, profited from
their underlings' collections of street loans, bookmaking, extortion,
and illegal video gambling.

The modern mobsters, Han said, were "beneficiaries" of their predecessors' reputations for killing.

"They did not disavow it," Han said. "They embraced it and exploited it."

To
prove conspiracy against the two alleged mob bosses, prosecutors do not
have to show that Ligambi and Borgesi committed crimes, Han said, only
that the two were aware that others would "carry out the mob business"
for them.

Han laid out what he described as a decade of evidence,
including jailhouse tapes of Ligambi visiting Borgesi, 49, while he was
serving a 14-year federal sentence in West Virginia, taped recordings
of Ligambi discussing business, photographs of Ligambi and his cohorts
at a 2010 wedding, and testimony of mob turncoats who described Ligambi
and Borgesi as the bosses.

Han stressed the importance of a 2010
meeting in a New Jersey restaurant between Ligambi and members of the
New York Gambino crime family.

"They weren't there to meet impostors," Han said of the New York mobsters.